David Rosen | Hi there! I'm a Senior Vice President of Digital Corporate & Public Affairs at Edelman. (Opinions expressed are my own and don't necessarily represent those of my employer.)

This Blog | "The Future" isn't just a point in time. It's also an idea that influences our culture. This blog explores how we think about "tomorrow" and how as a meme it has evolved over millennia. Topics include the future as an archetype, utopian and dystopian literature, the psychology of time, the futurism profession, science fiction as modern mythology, and anything else that helps us understand how we think about what's next.

Let's Connect | You're invited to check out my blog on B2B social media, follow me on Twitter, step into one of the circles in Google+, or connect via LinkedIn. Your feedback in the comments is warmly welcomed, or you can email me at davidhrosen (at) gmail.com

Social Media

December 13, 2012

What can Google's search data reveal about our hunger to know today what will happen tomorrow?

Using Google Trends and Google’s Keyword
Tool, I examined the top 350 future-oriented keywords. Combined, they represent 152,620,240 searches a month. Here are four of the major trends uncovered.

1. We think about the future most often in December and least often in July. The motivation behind this clockwork activity goes beyond New Year’s resolutions.
People are looking for predictions about their careers, spouses, industries and even countries.

2. Four industries are top of mind: One third of the 350 keywords focus on just four sectors --Technology,
Auto, Entertainment and Finance.
Anecdotally, we know that the concepts of technology and the future are often linked. What's different now is we can measure the degree
to which that’s true. We also see
the presence of sectors that aren’t as obviously linked to futurism.

3. The
only countries present in the data are the U.S., India and
Pakistan. I’ll leave it to others to guess why that's the case, but what’s startling is the absence of searches for
European, Asian and African nations.

4. Psychics? Really??? One in five future-oriented keywords reveal people looking for straight-out predictions. Together, they represent 34,889,400 searches a month! That's intriguing at first blush, but the data quickly takes a dismaying turn. Nearly everyone is looking to supernatural sources, like psychics and astrology, rather than rational ones grounded in science or professional forecasting. Maybe it's all in good fun looking up horoscopes, but still...99% is a big number.

Other interesting findings:

Jobs: There are 482,100
searches a month for terms related to future careers

Job security? The term "future proof" is searched 18,100 times per
month

Trends: “Future trends” is Google'd 74,000 times
a month.

How does this square with your expectations about how other people feel about the future? Leave your comments below, and check out Google Trends and Google's Keyword tool and play around with the data. If you see something interesting, please share!

January 28, 2010

My apologies for skipping out on posts the last month...I've been working on a very exciting white paper that has entered the wild today: The CMO's Guide to Tweetups. Nine delicious pages chock full of research, rationales, strategies and tactics designed to help CMO's and heads of public relations at Business-to-Business companies use launch their own tweetups.

While most of the tips came from my experience at NASA's tweetup of the launch of shuttle Atlantis in November, all the strategic sections are based on Makovsky's work with B2B's that sell complex services, products and -- at its root -- ideas to customers and investors.

For many companies in this space, using social media at all, much less hosting a tweetup, can seem strange. But as readers of this blog know, when it comes to complex ideas, there's no better medium for educating audiences, and then engaging them all the way down the marketing funnel than social media.

I invite you to take a read and add your thoughts in the comments section below.

December 08, 2009

If it wasn't clear from my exuberant coverage a couple weeks ago, NASA PR completely rocked the tweetup of STS-129. Here's an excerpt from a piece I had published today in Bulldog Reporter on what NASA did right -- that any company can learn from and copy. A white paper with the 35 things that NASA did right is coming out shortly. Leave a comment or shoot me an email if you'd like to be on the mailing list for it.

If any of my #NASAtweetup tweeps are reading this, I'd love your input below on what YOU thought NASA did right in cultivating a community online.

"You may not have a spaceship, but your company has a fan base. Maybe they're customers who
have relied on your product for decades and feel it belongs more to them than to you. Maybe
they're engineers who appreciate how hard it is to create new kinds of paint—or improve the
flavor of Tastykakes. Maybe they're investors fascinated with the countries where your company
does business. They won't think of themselves as fans until they're in a room with like-minded
people. They won't think of themselves as members of a community until you bring them together.
And you can't be accepted as a part of that community—reaping all the sales, visibility,
credibility and even free labor—until you get tweeting."

November 23, 2009

Gene Marbach, Makovsky colleague and author of the IRThereforeIAM investor relations blog, has a great post today on how corporate efforts to express a personality on mediums like Twitter can fuel rumors. This isn't to say you shouldn't express the human side via Twitter -- in fact, it's one of the biggest benefits social media offers to publicly traded companies -- just that you need to have an investor relations filter along with the customer, regulatory, employee and other filters in place when you use these powerful tools. Snip:

"People
can tweet about the most inane and trivial matters; however, seemingly
innocuous information can lead to rampant rumor-mongering. As CEOs tend
to hang out with other CEOs, mentioning a social lunch date could lead
to speculation about a merger between the companies. A visit to a
doctor can touch off speculation about an illness."

November 18, 2009

Social media guru and Makovsky colleague Jonathan Blank has written a must-read post on his blog, b2bcoffeeshops.com, about the importance of "findability." It was just recognized as one of the top five social media posts of the day by Sarah Evans, the moderator of #journchat.

Snip:

But today when you pick up that phone, stick on the stamp or press the
send button, you do so knowing there are fewer people on the other end
and those that are still there are probably ignoring you. Against this
backdrop of outbound marketing getting less effective, findability has become the primary concern of the entire marketing department- business unit marketing, content marketing, public relations, search engine optimization...Focus your marketing on making your content more relevant and more
extraordinary. Make it easily shareable. Use it as a response to the
content of competitors. Yes, actually talk openly about how your
conclusions compare to that of others. Take the time to Google your
experts and see if their digital footprint matches up with their point
of views. Are they easily found? Are they easily connected with?(Read full post here)

November 16, 2009

Given some stereotypes of social media users (I just told
a reporter from the German Press Agency that the Star Trek ones are
true :) ) this group is not a bunch of people who prefer to stare at their
iPhones instead of making eye contact. In fact, their most defining
characteristic is the ability to have a great conversation. They're
interesting and interested. Their hyper sharing online translates into
hyper helpfulness offline. And given the friendly nature of the
technical social channels, there's much more of a "we're all in this
together" feel than you would find at a space-focused industry
conference. So this tweetup, far from comprised of 100 geeks who can fill out
an online form really fast, is a precision filter for knowledgeable,
passionate and uber-information sharing members of the new media.

And since EVERY
company works in a sector where people are passionate about its ideas,
ANY company can enjoy similar success with atweetup. No space shuttle
required.

I thought I was attending this Tweetup to cover the shuttle launch. But I've found a better story: the real-time collision of traditional and social media spheres. Consider that we've got 101 Tweeters in their own media tent right next to the CBS and NBC buildings. There's a FOX News van parked outside. Journalists and twitterers are both eating the same gross hot dogs at the roach coach; no velvet line separating the two.

Some reporters have popped in to do segments, and the neat thing is we're doing segments on THEM, as they do segments on US! We're a spectacle, they're spectacle, and whichever flavor the audience -- all of you out there -- want, can be had with a click.

I've interviewed four journalists and six tweeps so far today and learned two things:

1. Journos are clearly nervous about the state of journalism, but they don't see social channels as a threat. Rather, they want in on what WE'RE doing. They love the enthusiasm; one clearly wished she could adopt our pro-romantic approach instead of sticking to the ethically required staid style. Another fully believes social coverage enhances interest in the topics that they're covering in different ways.

November 15, 2009

Miles O'Brien was a featured speaker at today's NASA Tweetup for STS-129. After a terrific speech (watch it here via UStream)about how the internet has changed journalism, he was kind enough to share his thoughts with me on how the quality of information delivered via social channels can be superior to that found in traditional media. Listen carefully because I think Miles coined a new term that should resonate in social circles...the "editorial commons."

November 11, 2009

November 04, 2009

There's a brilliant social media strategy in motion right now for Stephen King's new book, Under the Dome. The book's website is giving out the text snippet by snippet (5,196 pieces in all), encouraging people to distribute them through their social networks or in the physical world so that others can assemble them into a free online version. It's hide-and-seek meets a wiki meets social media. It's the coolest marketing idea I've seen since Sony's holographic dragon popped out of Toyko Bay (what? you haven't seen the video? Well here it is.)

So for all those treasure hunters out there, here's the piece of Under the Dome I received today:

____________________

believe he's dirty?' She did not hesitate. 'With all my heart.' Because Howie believed it - that's good enough for me. 'And you remember what's in the file?' 'Not the exact figures and the names of all the banks they used, but enough.' 'Then he'll believe you,' Barbie said. 'With or without a second copy of the paperwork,

______________________

And here's a challenge I'd like to propose...let's find the brilliant person who came up with this idea. I'm sure this is a well-guarded secret since the marketing effort is supposed to promote the book, not the marketer, but genius like this can't be left stuck under a...a...dome.